‘UNCHAIN ME’ BY DREAMTHINKSPEAK

Pavilion Estate, part of the Brighton Festival

”There are many groups like this one, all over the country, all over the world, just waiting for the moment of transformation”

TRIPLE LOCK PLOT SPOILERS! Normally I stick up a plot spoiler notice just in case anyone might care. This time, spoil means spoil! If you’re going to see this show, which is on till 12th June, you really don’t want to read this review first!

Anyone else old enough to remember the old ’End of Part One’ sketch where the cinema patrons end up getting seats within the film itself? The performances of DreamThinkSpeak, which in their own words “interweave life performance with film and instillations to create extraordinary journeys” are something similar.

Rather than setting up fixed areas for stage and audience you wander round an environment, coming across actors and interacting with them, as if you’ve been dipped in their world. After ’Before I Sleep’ and ‘The Rest Is Silence’, this the third of their Festival performances I’ve seen.

The Pavilion estate (for non-locals, a large area in central Brighton) is presented as a town in itself, under the dominion of the Governess. But steps are afoot to remove her, with a group of revolutionary cells led by her own brother Lucas. Buying a ticket is enough to get you mixed up in all this.

The politics, it has to be be said, were typical of this type of thing. The system is a semi-feudal affair, focused on the Aunt Sally figure of the Governess, not a social and economic relation which requires changing. (Though the olde-worlde look of the Pavilion estate may have been a factor here.) Revolutionaries are well-meaning middle-class types, cops hard-working proles. And those revolutionaries are divided into big-hearted idealists and violent fanatics. They first denounce the Governess’ dinner debate as a farce, but then participate in it. In fact, there’s too much formal debating in general. Their plan seems to be to tell her she’s not wanted, at which point she’ll be obliged to leave. Good luck with that…

However, I’m not sure how much that matters. Because it wasn’t really what the thing was about. Playing up the immersive nature of the drama, the actors don’t broadly soliloquise but directly address us, look us in the eye. At various points, we’re appealed to by both cops and revolutionaries. And we’ve no notion who we can trust, or whose plans are even credible. So, bewildered, we follow the guides around like human baggage hoping some resolution is reached.

Which, pretty much, is the state we live our lives in. But, by standing so near the spotlight, we start to feel singed by it. And I’d have to say I know this feeling! You turn to radical political groups because you want to get unchained, but before you know it you’re tied in knots.

I kept thinking how much this miasma of mistrust felt like descriptions of pre-revolutionary Russia. Forgetting that the Festival programme had already confirmed this was based on Dostoyevsky’s ’The Possessed’, which is about… as you may have guessed… pre-revolutionary Russia. In its own words, “plunging [us] into the feverish and hallucinatory world of Dostoyevsky’s vision.” This isn’t agitprop, but absurdist tragi-comedy for us to get ourselves mired in.

And then there’s technology. I’ve not read Dostoyevsky’s book, but assume characters in it don’t lug tablets around, which dispense clues and instructions of doubtful provenance. And of course modern activist culture does organise on-line, for both better and worse, the smartphone replacing the Little Red Book.

The show starts several days early, when you’re sent an email containing a weblink to Lucas speechifying. Then ends with a room of screens, each devoted to a character (both activist and cop), all talking at once. Which becomes a kind of summation of the experience. Remember the William Burroughs phrase, “Ain’t nothing left here now but the recordings”? (And modern life as an indecipherable babble seems a theme of the company.)

Everyone has to have a kind of origin story which led to them getting involved in the underground. Its pretty much the first thing we’re told. This is something commonly done when activist culture gets represented in the media, as a kind of instant motive, despite it not being at all accurate of that world. But then something smarter is done with this…

One of the things you run past is a Jam exhibition currently on at the Pavilion. And it’s hard not to think of those famous lines: “What a catalyst you turned out to be, Loaded the guns then ran off home for your tea”. They prove apt, when Lucas takes the opportunity to bump off his dominating big sister. All those grand, fine-sounding political speeches, and it had been a simple case of sibling rivalry all along.

Crucially his motives are not despotic, to seize control from her, but narrow and entirely personalised. You could call them petty, insofar as that term could be applied to murder. On accomplishing this he immediately disappears from the narrative, his real work done.

Though, as you’re arbitrarily assigned different guides on arrival, your perspective might change accordingly. Ours was Stela Maris, presented as the idealistic heart of the group, who begs troubled head Lucas not to shoot. (When you hear them clashing, off-stage but audible, it’s not unlike being a child and hearing your parents argue.) But Lucas was guide to his own group, who might well have seen in him a more tragic figure, playing out a kind of Greek tragedy in which the rest of us were more incidental.

Similarly, while my group did some very English squirming and eye-averting when asked by both sides to join up, I wondered if others might become more engaged. Arifa Akbar’s Guardian review suggests her group did. While a review in GScene commented more sourly: “We listen to radicalised young people talk of lost childhoods and a system which crushes them, we look around and admire the baroque and rococo back rooms we find ourselves in. We stay silent.”

All of which is to the good. However…

The show is not short of incident, sometimes quite dramatically so. But incident is not necessarily the same thing as narrative. And the hectic rushing from one supposedly ‘safe’ place to another, then again, did feel at times like incident was trying to take the place of narrative.

And the use of technology did seem a little half-hearted. It mostly seemed additional, the tablets we were asked to carry just underlining things we were already seeing or being told by our guide. Had someone switched theirs off at the start, there’s little they’d have missed. Dramatically, there should have been more times when the tablets were guiding us, demanding our trust.

I wondered if this was out of concern that some more technofeared attendees might fail to follow along. But a suggestion at the initial briefing that we’d need to work together, moving as a group, might have allayed that. Perhaps a more extended period at the start, where the tablets try to guide you to your guide, with plans getting stymied at the last minute.

Overall… well, it’s a hard thing to get a grip on. If it often feels like a frustrating experience, that we pass through spaces without really engaging with anything – well, that’s kind of the point. It is, by a strict definition of the term, Absurdist. Things make no sense, then they’re over, and it’s up to you to figure out how you’re going to deal with that. And that conflicts by definition with the standard dramatic needs, for closure and all of that. If you come away feeling dissatisfied and uninvolved, that’s kind of the point. What might feel like basic audience needs can just be at odds with the event.

But then again, other things have been Absurdist without this seeming so much of a problem. While it has much to commend it, you feel like it’s not *quite* there yet, it needs a little more road testing and fine-tuning. It couldn’t be claimed it equals their previous two festival offerings.

And finally (as they say on the news)… if this was more absurdist tragicomedy than political drama, there was still one clue which side the company might fall on. In the room of screens, both activists and cops supply a personal anecdote of how they came to be involved. And each activist has their own story while, like a troll farm, the cop tales are all identical…

'SILENCE'/ GNOD/ THE NECKS (GIG-GOING + BRIGHTON-FESTIVAL-ATTENDING ADVENTURES CONTD.)

‘SILENCE’
Black Rock, Brighton, Fri 24th May
Part of the Brighton Festival

Teatre Biuro Podrozy (aka Travel Agency Theatre) is an alternative theatre company, operating from Poland since 1988. The publicity reminded me of those Nineties-era performance outfits that came out of squat culture, such as the Mutoid Waste Company or the Dogs of Heaven, some hallucinogenic blend of Hieronymus Bosch and Mad Max set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Yet squat culture was essentially extinguished by Britain, by the simple if brutal expedient of extinguishing squatting. But the Mutoids themselves left the UK for less oppressive climes, so perhaps all that survived elsewhere…

This outdoor performance was described by the progamme as concerning “the continuing story of refugees and migrants caught up in a spiral of war and the dream of escape”. They specified this was in relation to the Middle East, but I was soon wondering whether that was being filtered through a Polish experience of history, a country in Sylvia Plath’s phrase “scraped flat by the roller of wars, wars, wars”.

The fiery wheel from the publicity image soon appears and becomes a defining metaphor for what followed, as settlers were plagued by successive waves of marauders. The first batch (seen in the illo) look Medievalist, but are soon replaced by a more modern army - as if we’re watching history on fast forward. While the settlers inhabit the stage the marauders often raise themselves off the ground, through stilts or wheels.

The performance well employs the physicality of the theatre. We’re well used to upsetting images shown via a screen, to the point they don’t upset us any more. Whereas you have quite a different reaction when the smell of real fire reaches your nostrils.

But the circularity of the fiery wheel, while driving force, also become a confine. It’s a short show, less than an hour. But to escape repetition each iteration has to add new props. Which at times make it one of those theatre shows where everything is doubtless symbolic of something or other. (Those metal poles, presented by the marauders as if a gift? Not a bleedin’ clue, mate.) Not performed with direct sound, the show had to be highly choreographed, which might well have added to this ritualised sense.

But there was an effective ending, largely through presenting so seemingly prosaic an image. The settlers, presumably realising their only choice has become to flee, made paper boats. A Council worker in high-vis then ambled on to hose the stage down. It’s an open note to end on. Was this the boats finding a tide so they might set sail, or just being washed away like street litter? Something no refugee can know before they start their journey.

It has not, to be honest, been a great Brighton Festival. I found there was less I wanted to see than normal, and from my admittedly limited perspective general attendance seemed down. It’s not that stuff was bad, so much as promising but with promises that were continually not fully fulfilled, the cumulative effect of which is frustrating.



GNOD
Patterns, Brighton, Sat 25th May

Gnod are a band I’ve meant to catch live long before now. But somehow events have conspired against me, and things got to their thirteenth year before it happened.

The gig starts with the double drummers predominant, pounding a circular motif around which the rest of the band arrange themselves, almost like the Butthole Surfers. But the combined force of three… yes, three guitars soon kicks in in earnest. Gnod are, it would be quite hard to miss, a heavy riffing band. Their riffs are powerful and yet unpropulsive. They effectively hang in the air. They’re not just heavy, they’re dark and viscous. Tracks don’t progress so much as thicken.

There are vocal sections, but they don’t really seem the point of the exercise. The music itself does the talking. The set runs all the tracks together, joining them by patches of feedback, which adds to the overpowering sense. The set seems a single thing, a black monolith.

Though at times they lay on repetition to insanity and beyond, just like Sabbath back in the day they’re able to throw in unexpected changes. Guitars gang up in the onslaught but can turn against one another, less counterpoint than counter-forces in grinding tectonic plates of sound. It feels entirely unpredictable at the same time it feels unescapable.

Getting all carried away in the heady atmosphere, I came to see the set as like falling into the power of underworld demons, being smashed into pieces then reassembled in a different order. And, reading a few online reviews, I don’t seem the only one to go in for such fancy talk.

They have a (kind of) religious name. But perhaps more importantly like Swans, who they to some degree resemble, their music isn’t just powerful but overpowering, essentially oppressive. Yet, like Swans, people often talk of it in quite spiritual terms. It’s like the act of surrendering to its onslaught is in itself quite blissfull, as you trust it to take you where you need to be.

Nigh-on thirty minutes of earshred from London the following night…



Then after something that could scarcely be any more of a Saturday let-rip, along came Sunday and...

THE NECKS
St. Luke’s Church, Brighton, Sun 26th May

If I’d not had the pleasure of knowing Gnod before now, in happier news I’ve managed to catch the Necks numerous times, stretching back to Lucid Frenzy’s Ye Olde Print Days. (Even if I missed the last show.) They come self-described as “one of the great cult bands of Australia. Not entirely avant-garde, nor minimalist, nor ambient, nor jazz, the music of The Necks is possibly unique.” As ever the trio provided two long, improvised pieces separated by an interval.

The first was perhaps the classic Necks experience, slow to find its way but progressing like a trickling stream with soon becomes a surging torrent. Lloyd Swanton’s hands on his double bass neck proved almost a timeline for the piece, initially providing brief snaps on the upper neck, slowly migrating down before finally starting with the bowing. Much of Chris Abraham’s piano was quite Minimalist in nature, short phrases played circularly.

Yet, however good it is to hear more Necks, the second piece was more unique and so the one which really made the night. It got going much more quickly, with Swanton bowing from the start. Abrahams played longer, more rolling melodic passages while Tony Buck largely kept to percussion. Combined with Swanton’s slow, measured bowing the effect was mesmerising.

Despite originating in Jazz, surely one of the more urban music forms, and in Sydney, not the smallest of towns, nature analogies do seem to lend themselves to the Necks. Partly to do with their unhurried pacing, partly to do with their music having a kind of understated might.

And the very last sighting, in fact, I was comparing their sound to wide open spaces. Which well matched the first section of this second number. But like a river the Necks can take strange curves. And from there it grew sharper and tighter, like a panorama shot across rolling hillsides which then shifts into close focus. (And if that seems a curveball, wait until you hear what happens mid-way through their latest DC, ’Body.’
There are several bands who could be said to match John Peel’s description “always different, always the same”. But the Necks must be prime among them.

A nigh-on seven minute excerpt, a mere smidgen of a track in Necksland…



… plus the trio in fine form in their home town. Forty-plus minutes duration, but worth staying for…

Coming soon! Blog hols...

SALOME/ KRIS DREVER/ DREAM MANDE: BAMANAN DJOUROU (GIG-GOING + BRIGHTON-FESTIVAL-ATTENDING ADVENTURES)

‘SALOME’ (WITH LIVE SOUNDTRACK)
The Old Market, Hove, Thurs 23rd May
Part of the Brighton Festival

This 1923 film was based on Oscar Wilde’s play and styled after Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for it. And, as with other films of its era, its theatrical in a positive way. Not just uninterested in affecting naturalism, it positively revels in artificiality and the opportunities that creates. Notably, the film never leaves Herod’s palace, which is treated as a castle in the sky. (Well, a mountaintop, but it comes to the same thing.)

Particularly with its close-ups, film inevitably throws the artificiality into sharper relief than stage. It’s not just that the bizarre wigs and costumes are highlighted (though it’s partly that), it’s the way objects (keys, royal rings) can be enlarged on the screen to the point they become fetishised. And, though described in the Festival guide as a “cornerstone of camp”, it doesn’t have the self-parodying humour of camp. It uses film to stage psychoscapes.

I’ve not read Wilde’s play if I’m honest, but the consensus seems to be his achievement was bending the original Bible story until Salome (previously un-named) emerged as the protagonist. (Herod effectively becomes the lonely businessman emptying his wallet in a lapdancing club.) Interestingly, the actor who played Salome, Alla Nazimova, also produced the film.

Which plays up an interesting tension. Sexuality is here all about dressing up and performance, perhaps most obviously in her dance of the seven veils. Yet in this version her desire for John The Baptist is real. The film takes this as a given. But, with his plain loincloth against all this luxuriousness, this could be taken as her yearning for the real. He’s the one exception to the decadent rule of Herod’s palace, a gender-inverted virtuous maiden who refuses her kisses.

The fact of which is to make the tragedy hers. In seizing on him as a means to escape her world’s addiction to sensory gratification she subjects him to her sensory gratification. In other words, reduces him back into a prisoner of the palace. She’s effectively a prisoner of it herself, even if her cage is more gilded. Title cards were removed from this showing, but one states “She kills the thing she loves; she loves the thing she kills.”

Hayley Fohr of Circuit Des Yeux provides the live soundtrack. The Festival programme played up her baritone vocals, which are rich. But the soundtrack is uneven, and sometimes feels unfocused. At times it’s almost clumsy, transitions in the music not matched by anything on the screen. The electronic sections seemed to be for when the film focused on characters, like personalised mood music, but often felt meandering.

But the circular, sonorous motifs of the violin and double bass provided an earthiness to counterpoint the pie-in-the-sky proceedings. And the instrumentation could be boldly pared down, so each instrument got it’s (in cinema terms) close-up. The drums in particular were held back, then came in with a harsh rattle for the deathly finale, a funereal full stop to proceedings.

Films of this antirealist aesthetic seem most suited to the live soundtrack treatment. As a result, they often get it. And the truth is I’ve heard it all done better. For example Partial Facsimile’s live score for ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ was much more successful, despite arriving without any Festival fanfare. However the weaknesses here could still be worked out. It has the makings of a decent soundtrack, but needs finalising.

None of the soundtrack seems to be on-line, but the film’s public domain so can be seen here.

KRIS DREVER
The Con Club, Lewes, Sat 11th May

Lau-related proceedings so far… After having first seen Martin Green perform his solo project Flit, and then the full folk trio in action in Shoreham last Winter, this was my chance to catch frontman Kris Drever.

The tour was pre-announced with the notice “he will be performing traditional songs and previously unreleased material from one off projects, as well as music from his award winning back catalogue.” And he performed few Lau songs (if, in a welcome unsurprise, finishing with ’Ghosts’), and had only solo CDs on his merch stall.

However, they were similar enough to confirm my working hypothesis that the band start off with Drever’s songs, then subject them to elaborate and inventive arrangements. Certainly Drever’s solo songs seem quite different to Green’s.

He played solo and often quite simply, attaching a capo to his guitar for several numbers. And I found that, as a general rule, the simpler the accompaniment, the less his hands moved on the frets, the better the song seemed to work. Drever’s songwriting seems remarkably akin to his personality, understated yet beguiling and resonant. (Though he had pedals at his feet, so like so often the apparent simplicity may have actually been hard work to convey.)

He keeps his subject matter similarly close, ranging from life on Orkney (where he lived) to life on Shetland (where he lives now), occasionally breaking out as far as Dundee. He joked about “going for the big universal themes”. Yet of course folk is all about finding the universal in the particular. Songs stretch back into ancient history, and up to the present day.

From Cork…

 

DREAM MANDE: BAMANAN DJOUROU
Dome Theatre, Brighton, Sat 18th May
Part of The Brighton Festival

I confess to mildly mixed feelings on Malian singer Rokia Traore becoming guest director of this year’s Brighton Festival. Not because I don’t like African music, I like a lot of what little I know. But because I’m somewhat cynical about the generic applause it generates from the hands of white Western audiences. Applause which simultaneously exoticises black music while awarding yourself politically correct points.

Initially, Traore is one in a chorus of five singers who take turns to sing the lead. Assuming this was the pattern for the proceedings, I figured we were in for a night which was merely okay-ish. I’m somewhat skeptical of the everyone-gets-a-go format, which normally ends up with no-one getting enough time to get a real go.

Traore then spoke of the irony that some of the worst places to hear African music or see African art can be in Africa itself, due to the lack of entertainment infrastructure, and the foundation that had been devised to counter that.

From then on, she sang lead - and the night was much better for it. In fact my personal highlight was the very next number. It was the only song in English, and she seemed to adjust her vocal style to suit the language - a kind of calm, measured anger. Following her talk it seemed concerned with the situation in Africa today, so perhaps coining a new genre - the State of the Continent song.

And my second favourite, ending the main set, was the only choral number. Traore explained it was a “classical’ (presumably traditional), which became a hit record a while ago. The combination of which seems to sum up her attitude to music.

MONO/ KING OF GHOSTS/ GLASS'S BOWIE SYMPHONIES (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

MONO
The Haunt, Brighton, Sat 4th April

Mono’s monicker may be intended ironically, as they go in for expansive instrumentals ofter described as “post-rock”. (Though the band themselves have responded “music is communicating the incommunicable; that means a term like post-rock doesn't mean much to us”.) Based in Japan, they’re now celebrating their twentieth anniversary and tenth album. Wikipedia notes “the band's live performances are noted for their intensity” (without anyone adding ‘citation required’).

They’re as uninterested in rock’n’roll theatrics as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, playing backlit so as to be become virtual silhouettes, heads bowed in classic shoegaze pose. There’s precisely one track with vocals, possibly the only one of their career, which is sung (I kid not) from behind a pillar. And they speak precisely once, on coming back for the encore to remind us of that twentieth anniversary. Maybe they won’t speak again till the next one.

There may be musical similarities to Godspeed, such as the shimmering guitar sound. But they’re probably best described by Mark Radcliffe’s classic comment about Television, “the nearest rock record to a string quartet”. Though they’re more like this description than they are like Television. In fact they may be more like the description than Television are! Perhaps notably, tracks on the most recent release feature both strings and wind players.

There is perhaps a formula of sorts. Several tracks start off with a slow, measured melody line. Counter-melodies them get added gradually, until the whole thing hits a crescendo. (Often underlined by an abrupt change in lighting.) It’s like watching an abstract painting being composed, first a coloured line being drawn across the canvas, then different shapes forming, before the colours all finally run together.

But if it’s a formula it’s a good formula! Each section seems the thing when you’re inside it, the melody lines involving in their own right, nothing just a bridge to move the track along. In fact it was the track least bound to this, the one with the vocals (‘Breathe’) which seemed the weakest. Mono’s life performances are, it seems, to be noted for their intensity.

From Belgrade…



'KING OF GHOSTS' (SOUMIK DATTA + THE CITY OF LONDON SINFONIETTA)
The Dome, Brighton, Wed 8th May
Part of the Brighton Festival

In which Soumik Datta provided live soundtracks to two Indian films on the sarod, a kind of cousin to the sitar which I am now going to pretend I previously knew existed.

For the first half he played in a trio to ’Around India With a Movie Camera’, an assemblage of imperial-era footage. The film provoked some titters at the crassness of Raj attitudes, not least a speech where the King harped on the virtues of being in a “free Empire”. (Yo wot, your majesty?) Alas the music wasn’t particularly effective, with the East-meets-West combination of instruments serving up a very mild curry indeed.

The problem may have been that the source material was by its nature snippets, like flipping through a book of postcards. And the music seemed to need longer stretches to work up a head of steam, so was always stalling.

Things picked up for the second half with ’King Of Ghosts’. This was a “reimagined” version of Satajit Ray’s ’Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne’ (1968) which, like no other Ray film I’ve ever seen, was a fantastical adventure featuring magic shoes, dancing demons, wizards in sunglasses and the King of the Ghosts. It seemed more ’Monkey’ than ’The Chess Players’. (And yes, I do know ’Monkey’ wasn’t Indian.)

For this Datta got his longer breaks to stretch out into. Plus he was joined by the City of London Sinfonia. Their contribution was often to create a musical mood for the scene, a task they took to with some alacrity and little regard for the conventions of musicality. For example, in an early scene the title character wanders into a wood. To which their rustling and whispering straight away evoked the sense this was something supernatural we were going into. In short, they made the film more like it was than it had been already.

From London...



PHILP GLASS: THE BOWIE SYMPHONIES
Royal Festival Hall, London, Thurs 9th May

The occasion was the European premiere of ’Lodger’, the final album of David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy and last to be made a symphony by Philip Glass. (Though nigh-on a quarter-century after its predecessor.) Tonight all three were performed in succession.

In a pre-concert talk Glass said that he’d gone furthest from the original in content as well as chronology, and in fact had only used Bowie’s words. Which was slightly strange to hear, for no-one has ever suggested the Berlin trilogy was primarily about the words. In fact Bowie may well have written them in rebellion against the notion of ‘meaningful’ lyrics.

Then again, the decision arguably exposes the essential arbitrariness of the “Berlin trilogy” concept, for ’Lodger’ has as much in common with the album after it as the album before. With ’Low’ Glass used the second all-instrumental side. (In the programme he mentally reversed the sides, imagining that came first.) And ’Heroes’,though it departs further from its source, only incorporates two vocal numbers. Whereas Lodger’ has not a single instrumental.

’Low’ is known as Bowie’s “blue’ album, and if it had a colour scheme it would be nocturnal blues, greys and blacks. While in Glass’s hands those colours become oranges and yellows. The programme compares it to Debussy and Raphael.

Only the final movement, ’Warzawa’, has anything that might conceivably be called low, and even there the deep, mournful notes yield to something bright. Driving through the winter to hear it in Bexhill seemed appropriate, like walking through the dark evenings to hit Christmas. As said at the time, the result is “pretty much win-win-win… as tuneful as pop music, as hypnotic as minimalism and as dynamic as classical music.”

If the talk had focused on ’Lodger’s vocals, what hit immediately was another new element - the organ. The venue’s recently refurbished organ, with prodigious pipes, was played by James McVinnie. (Last seen playing solo Glass pieces in Falmer.) This quite literally added a new dynamic, making the music much more propulsive, turning like an elegant machine. The programme points out “here the orchestra is enormous and lush.”

Unfortunately, a few seconds into the first vocal starting your reaction was “uh-oh”. They seemed performed as if singer Angelique Kidjo had just been handed the lyrics, with no indication of style or melody, and so was just proclaiming them. Rather than sparking any kind of creative dissonance they just sounded double-booked with the music. In a completely inverse effect to the organ, they acted as a drag on everything. I found myself trying to tune them out, like a loud audience member who for some reason couldn’t be shushed.

The one time, the solo time, they seemed to work was at the end of ’African Night Flight’. A section which I’ve no idea is in a foreign language or simply scatting, but comes to the same thing - there the vocals weren’t about the words.

It seems clear enough that Glass wrote a symphony but then decided to shoehorn in his vaguely made promise to complete this trilogy. (Though, and before anyone asks, he had started composing before Bowie’s death.) I foresee much future debate, between purists of authorial intent who insist it must be played as written and the rest of us.

KRONOS QUARTET/ LES AMAZONES D'AFRIQUE (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

KRONOS QUARTET (WITH SAM GREEN + TRIO DA KALI)
The Barbican, London, Fri 18th May

This double serving of the contemporary string quartet Kronos kicked off with ‘A Thousand Thoughts’, a “live documentary” film with co-director Sam Green narrating in person as they played live. It looked back over the ensemble’s history, dating back to 1973.

This was at points gimmicky, prone to some Californian philosophising and the live presentation made Green more central a figure than he needed to be. But it did possess a good-humoured style, and the good sense to locate their origins in Seventies New York through verite footage of streets and subways rather than the usual cliched images. (Reagan, check… punk rock kids, check… Studio 54, check… they come up like clip art on a bad business presentation.)

The biggest takeaway… Though the ensemble are not themselves composers they have an active working relationship with their composers, many of whom have written especially for them and many of whom (including Philip Glass and Terry Riley) are interviewed herein. Which was probably just the way music worked until comparatively recently, when ‘classical’ became a heritage industry.

The biggest highlight… the quartet playing along to a film of a throat singer becoming more and more unhinged, until she finally broke off laughing to a spontaneous round of applause.

The greatest surprise… such passing reference to their reworking of Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’, which always seemed their crossover ‘hit’ at the time. Certainly it was the first I heard of them, and at the time I’d no idea they’d already been going for well over a decade. Perhaps they now see it the way Hawkwind do ‘Silver Machine’, as something of an albatross.

The second half was a collaboration with the Malian group Trio Da Kali. Not having heard the album, and perhaps still half in mind of the contemporary-meets-traditional soundworld of Xylouris White, I was surprised to the degree that the quartet merely sat in with the trio - more companions than collaborators. They often played in unison, a highly unusual thing for a string quartet to do, underlining Hawa Diabete’s vocals. Not, you understand, that was any kind of a drawback...

The Trio perform Griot, which is some combination of history, storytelling and praise singing. Though the programme spoke of their sound being “as wild as possible”, in fact they were measured and calming, with some elegant yet understated melodies. The nearest Western equivalent would be Gospel, albeit not the Gospel that led to Soul. The programme also mentioned Mahalia Jackson.

Though the programme also spoke of the Quartet having the words translated to aid their playing, I always enjoy not knowing. It’s the glossolalia effect of words sung in a language you can’t comprehend, which always feels like they’re singing of things otherwise beyond expression.

The only downside was too many solos on the Balafon (a kind of marimba), which seemed to jar with the otherwise collective spirit. But then I am a curmudgeon when it comes to solos.




LES AMAZONES D’AFRIQUE
Brighton Done, Thurs 24th May

Part of the Brighton Festival

Then, completely by luck and not in any way by clever planning, I was hearing more Malian music less than a week later. Only this time it couldn’t have been any more upbeat.

Les Amazones ranged between desert blues, with a trio of women singers delivering some mesmerising choral vocals, and energetic, uplifting Afro Beat, where they’d more take turns to sing lead.

Music always feels more involving when it seems spontaneous, not in the sense of improvised but of happening in the moment. It comes across as organic rather than mechanical, and minimises any sense of separation between performer and audience. You’re hypnotised into thinking you could just step up and join in. (Fortunately for all, I didn’t act on this impulse.)

And this was underlined by the way the singers casually swapped hand-held percussion, seemingly as the moment took them. The finale ran through a bunch of staggered endings, like they didn’t want to leave the stage any more than we wanted to see them go - the equivalent of when a friend gets up to leave but falls into a cycle of saying “I’ll be off then”.

I can sometimes be a little cynical over seeing African music in a setting like this. Too many middle class white folks convinced they’re doing something terribly, terribly multicultural. Too much generic approval for anyone who looks like they fit the ‘African’ part. But then there’s times when the thing just works.

From Jools Holland (but really, don't let that put you off)…

XYLOURIS WHITE/ XFRMR (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

XYLOURIS WHITE + DANIEL BLUMBERG
St. George’s Church, Brighton, Thursday 17thMay
Part of the Brighton Festival

As the above image might suggest, Xylouris White are an odd-couple duo. Jim White’s the drummer from the Dirty Three, who now looks like Steve Pemberton playing the part of a rock drummer. George Xylouris looks like an old Greek guy with a beard and a Cretan lute, which is exactly what he is.

But perhaps the magic of the thing is that it’s not self-conscious fusion food. ‘All music is music’ seems like one of those platitudinous statements like ‘all religions are one’, it might sound fine but doesn’t get you very far in practise. Except, every now and again, it does.

Xylouris, originally taught traditional-style by his uncle, doesn’t seem to modify much what he’s going for the rock duo format - but it all fits anyway. White doesn’t play beneath but alongside him, fully occupying the place he sits on stage. His free-flowing, exuberant drumming seems to mostly be called “avant-rock”. In fact, having played together for five years they’ve become like old-style travelling troubadours, seemingly only deciding what to play from one track to the next, sometimes by playing snatches at each other.

The music doesn’t just have a sonic range, but seems able to operate on different scales, from close and intimate up to rising flights which grow more expansive and ever-higher, like a bird catching an updraft. They’ll go into extended wig-outs, with no muso egoism.

Support act Daniel Blumberg had one of the most “have they started yet” starts I’ve encountered in recent years. And it wasn’t long after I realised they had started, then over the tapping and scraping of instruments and harmonica wails the guitarist started to sing. At that point, had he hurled himself through a hoop of fire, I’d scarcely have been any more surprised.

As things went on it swapped between some Neil Young style ‘country blues’ and free-form instrumentals, but rather than switching it ebbed and flowed between them. Plus the instrumental sections were quite unpredictable, from stray lines it was left to you to join together, to a great sonic wallop. The Festival says he “weds an improvisational, free-music ethos to raw emotional songwriting”.

Not from Brighton (like that’s something unusual)…



XFRMR
The Spire, St. Mark’s Chapel, Brighton, Wed 16th May
Part of the Brighton Festival

Dubbed by the Festival as “a show as lively as electricity itself,” Robbie Thompson’s electro compositions were synched to a Tesla coil which would “audio-reactively” emit flashes of electricity in time to the music.

From this description, I’d expected some full-on affair, designed to stir that coil into greater and greater action, an electronic version of bear baiting. Yet the music was quite varied, seemingly requiring two laptops and a synth. It included swooshes, stabs, blasts, beats and even a ‘space lounge’ mid-section. At its most effective, it would manage to lay one of these elements on top of another.

And this proved both to be its success and its weakness. At points it scattershot, particularly in the opening section, feeling it’s way rather that striding ahead. And, with some smart sound design at points, it was a shame not to have had quadrophonic sound.

The event was billed as an audio-visual “spectacle”, with the coil placed centre stage. And, placed just before the Chapel’s altar, it did make for a perfect setting, like something out of Seventies science fiction. It was even miked up, so as well as reacting to the sound it contributed to it. 

But it seemed a somewhat reluctant leading act, and even when stirred sparingly you soon got used to the electrical shots. It may not be an entirely fair comparison, as the scale of the events were so different, but Stockhausen’s ‘Cosmic Pulses’ at the Barbican was a more effective inducement of synaesthesia.

I did wonder if, rather than inspiring the piece, the coil was hit on to overcome the standard “nothing to look at complaint” made of electronic music. And, assuming that’s something which needs a fix, it’s true the coil’s taking things in the right direction. Narrative visuals, anything that smacks of a rock video, always seem to re-familiarise this music, take away its unique energy. 

And different lighting effects were used on the Faraday cage it was placed in, to some good effect. Though this was taken further by Conrad Shawcross’’Slow Art Inside a Cube’ work at the Hayward’s ’Light’ exhibition, which moved a light source around a cage to play with shadow effects.

But ultimately that fix has to be about getting away from the staticperformer/audience face-off, creating an environment for people to pass through as they feel like. Last year’s 'Siren’ isn’t really a direct comparison, as that was more installation than live performance, but it might still serve as a guide.

Skip past the irrelevant support band in this (not from Brighton) clip...

NB I have no idea how I ended up reviewing two X bands in one go, but as Yo La Tengo were last time presumably we're working backwards through the alphabet so expect a profusion of W's next week....

'THE FLYING LOVERS OF VITEBSK'/ DEERHOOF + STARGAZE/ YO LA TENGO (GIG-AND-THEATRE-ATTENDING ADVENTURES)

‘THE FLYING LOVERS OF VITEBSK’
Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Falmer, Brighton, 9th to 12th May
(...so, for the fleet of foot, still on tonight!)

Part of the Brighton Festival

The Brighton Festival programme describes this play as “trac[ing] the lives of” Marc Chagall “the 20th century’s most influential Jewish artist and his wife as they navigate the Pogroms, the Russian Revolution, and each other.”

Kneehigh’s production is perhaps faultless. The dialogue’s sharp and memorable without being showy. The two leads, particularly Audrey Brisson as the wife Bella Rosenfeld, are strong. The active physical-theatre style conveys the feeling of Chagall’s artwork, where everything feels free-floating, as if in some grand dance, without resorting to mere mimicry. Different lighting styles and some minimal props cross a simple set, aided by two on-stage musicians, propelling the drama along.

Under the hood, however, there’s some problems...

Chagall is characterised as an idealist innocent, too unworldly to kiss his future bride on their first date, yet also possessed of a child’s innate selfishness. He’s given the look of a silent film star, a Harold Lloyd hat above a hapless white face. I know almost nothing of his personality, and it’s quite possible he was something like this – a naive man whose medium was naive art. But in dramatic terms it seems a somewhat cliched way to portray an artist.

Moreover, the elliptical structure might have been necessary to span the story but serves to make his frequent acts of selfishness towards Bella seem consequenceless, a character quirk, a fact of life to be accepted.

The play starts with a critic on the phone, feeding Marc vast chunks of verbiage in the earnest hope he’ll simply agree. Nonplussed and unengaged he lets the phone dangle to show the audience a photo of his home town of Vitebsk. A town, he explains, largely destroyed by Nazis in the War. Later he expresses frustration at the notion there’s a “mystery” to his art.

The inference of course is that his art is rooted where he was rooted, in Vitebsk, and so the phone is not just asking him the wrong questions but the wrong sort of questions. But this doesn’t lead into perhaps the central question about Chagall. To create his folk image of Vitebsk did he need distance from the physical Vitebsk, that his heart might grow so fond? He once said “my homeland exists only in my soul”. And ironically given his evocations of home his art was always most appreciated outside of Russia, where his cows and fiddlers seemed exotic.

After all, pre-warVitebskmayhave been historic and picturesque but it was not the rustic village hiswork sometimes made it seem. He describes it as having two cathedrals and numerous synagogues, and even today it’s Belarus’ fourth largest city.

The question’s not a simple one. His style first developed when he went to Paris. Yet he was back in Vitebsk between 1914 and 1920, and painting prolifically. Though he only stayed home so long because the outbreak of war prevented his return to Paris.

Bella, it’s revealed, was a writer and actor in her own right. (I’d previously seen her only as a figure who showed up in his paintings, so I suppose I’m no better than the Incels.) But the play seems divided over how to treat her. In the Festival quote above, it’s clear that “each other” is saved for last because it’s the most important, that the Pogroms and Revolutions are like sudden gusts of wind which blow their relationship this way and that. At it’s heart, this is a love story.

When Marc was first developing his art in Paris Bella remained home. Later, in a cruelirony, just like Vitebsk the war killed her. (She got an infection, which would have been curable had medicine not been in short supply.) All of which suggests she was a metonym of Vitebsk for him, personalising all it meant.

Yet she describes them as opera glasses, looking at the same things in parallel. When they are forced to leave Vitebsk, she says they should pack their memories like suitcases. In this way she’s not his muse or subject, but they are companion eyes.

It is of course entirely possible that this division isn’t the plays – that Marc saw their relationship one way and Bella the other. But then that would make for something to explore. There are some stabs at this. When Bella briefly resumes acting she fills with life, while he essentially sulks in a chair. Yet these aren’t quite sufficient. As Marc and Bella navigate each other, the view turns most towards his opera glass.



DEERHOOF + STARGAZE
Brighton Dome, Wed 9th May

Part of the Brighton Festival

This double-headliner was due to Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier having been commissioned by contemporary ensemble Stargaze to score a reworking of Fugazi’s classic ’In On the Kill Taker’. Introducing the night in his customary angsty outsider artist persona, Saunier was keen to stress that the whole notion was preposterous – he’d no idea how to transpose from hardcore punk to classical instruments, he’d never even heard the album before and besides that he’d be scoring each number for a solo instrument.

The last one might have been a chess move too far. It’s true that a single instrument score isn’t the same thing as a rock solo. And even when, for the most part, you couldn’t work out which track was being cited, the point of the exercise was to change things not reproduce them. But while Fugazi might have contained great songwriters, what really made them stellar was how well they worked as a unit – they gelled, like few others.

And in fact it was the few, brief ensemble sections which worked the best. The solo pieces sounded fragmentary. It was as if we were hundreds of years hence, where only snippets of the original had survived, perhaps from some almost unplayable LP, so we were effectively trying to reconstruct an ancient culture from some broken bits of pot.

I can go for this sort of thing, whether it’s Steve Reich reworking Radiohead or Phillip Glass channelling Bowie. But this was perhaps an example of the problem of postmodern art, where all things are supposed to be of equal value, and exchanging them seems the best way of conveying that. Whereas all that happens is that everything is made to seem equally valueless.

I wondered how Deerhoof’s lo-fi aesthetic would fare at the far-from-intimate Dome venue. And their characteristic on-stage line-up, screwing with the heraldic rock formation by actually lining everyone up, including the drummer, looked stranger still on the large stage. But the illfittingness actually fitted. There were several technical hitches, including Satomi Matzusaki’s vocal mike cutting out at an inopportune moment, causing her to break into an impromptu dance routine while Saunier sang into his miked-up snare. 

But it all just added to the ramshackle exuberance of the thing. It felt almost like going back to the early Sixties, before dedicated music venues, where bands just played wherever they could.

There’s little more to say about their sound, which is going further in the same direction as their last appearance three years ago. For both better and worse, they’re becoming more of a band. Real rock licks break in at times!

For the encore, they were joined by four of Stargaze’s wind players. Which worked so well you only wished they’d done it for more of the set. For the first, slower number their contribution enriched the melody, like fizzy sparkly pop has been transubstantiated into fine wine.

As ever, not from Brighton…



YO LA TENGO

Royal Festival Hall, London, Fri 4th May

“37 record store clerks feared dead in Yo La Tengo concert disaster”, ran the Onion headline. And the band are seen by some as the eptiome of suburban indie, music for the self-styled sensitive souls who read Nick Hornby books. There may not be an entire absence of truth to this description, they even crack a joke about playing for themselves while in the interval a few trainspotters rushed to the front to check out the equipment.

Yet it’s more to do with having a handy example to attach to a phenomenon. And it’s probably made easier by the band’s music being much less pindownable. Since 1984 they’ve been producing, in Wikipedia’s words, an “eclectic combination of folk, punk rock,shoe-gazing, long instrumental noise-jams, and electronic music.”

This night kicks off with a spacy drone which builds into a motorik trance-out, with double drumming despite the band only being a trio. Always a good way of getting my attention. And the first half’s set was mostly devoted to unadorned melodies, the percussion on one track being no more than the odd tap on the bass.

True, every now and again it does start to sound like easy listening for snowflakes, as if the magic potion failed to kick in. But for the majority of the time songs tasted like home cooking, made from a handful of simple ingredients but leaving a lasting taste. Free-form instruments surrounded the songs, sometimes brief interludes allowing band members to switch instruments, sometimes longer. One psychedelic number effectively combined both.

I’m not a fan of splitting gigs in half. It’s like putting an ad break in a film then not even showing any ads. But they use the two halfs to switch over, taking things in a more uptempo direction. Though tracks remained unhurried affiars, until the final few numbers. Whereupon the band who’d earlier mastered slow-tempo compositions suddenly transformed into a rock-out combo, instruments taking off in their hands like the Pink Panther clutching a raging outboard motor.

I was even able to cope with the guitar solos, partly because the rhythm section was more than merely the bread in the sandwich, and partly because the guitar would get genuinely unhinged. Only the extended guitar of the finale taxed my patience.

They had to huddle together before taking the encore, as if it had come as an unexpected development. Whereupon they covered the TVP’s ’Park Time Punks’.

Overall, colour me a record store clerk.

Not from London...

MELT-BANANA/ ROYAL TRUX/ OOIOO/ THE COSMIC DEAD/ BRITTEN SINFONIA + BRIGHTON FESTIVAL CHORUS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES ON OVERLOAD)

MELT-BANANA
Patterns, Brighton, Thurs 1st June

Between buying my ticket and attending the gig, I discovered longstanding live favourite Melt-Banana had slimmed down to a duo. I tried to imagine how that might change their sound, and concluded it would either inhibit them or take them somewhere new. Perhaps further into the power electronics direction they’d embarked on in recent shows.

Turns out, I’m a total know-nothing. The power electronics section was gone and they were, if anything, back to the classic Melt-Banana of old. And about as awesome as ever. Singer Yako operated some brightly coloured console, often brandishing it like a Harry Potter wand, from which the back-up instruments were triggered. (I later discovered this to be a MIDI controller. Gotta control those Midis, I guess…)

And classic Melt-Banana, if we were to reduce it to a formula, is a melting down of noise, punk, no-wave, metal and… yes, really pop. Yako might fire her vocals like a machine gun with a stuck trigger, but there’s strong tunes amid all the noise. And I’m not the only one to think so. Frank Mojica of Consequences of Sound has noted that “beneath the cacophony… were delightful pop melodies.”

Except I’m not even sure about ‘beneath’. Some noise music does have buried melodies, which take awhile to find, like a file with a cake in it. But with Melt-Banana tunes effectively ride atop everything, as if surfing a tsunami of noise. You get the exhilaration of noise combined with the sugar rush of pure prop.

As said over Lightning Bolt, noise music isn’t all angsty or aggressive – in fact it can be joyous and celebratory. John Lydon nailed it many years ago, when he sang “We like noise, it’s our choice/ It’s what we want to do.” And perhaps precisely because there’s more of a punk element to the sound, that’s even more noticeable with Melt-Banana.

And you can see that in the audience response. I’ve never known a mosh pit not to open up at a Melt-Banana gig, and I’ve never known it to become macho or aggressive. It’s souped-up good time music on steroids, but good time music still. You would need, I think, some term which portmanteaued ‘riot’ and ‘party’ to describe the Melt-Banana experience.

ROYAL TRUX

The Haunt, Brighton, Wed 31st May

Royal Trux were one of those Nineties bands who were fellow travellers with Grunge. There was the same desire to get rock music its bad name back, to get back to a time when music was made by and for reprobates and degenerates. Once, a street kid with his arse hanging out his jeans wasn’t ever going to get a record deal. Then, about a week later, he was the only one who was. Trux, only recently dropped by their indie label, were suddenly bunged a million dollars by Virgin. (As a sign of the times, check out this vid of them playing on ‘The Word’. Those scuzzy louts were never going to be allowed among that studio audience without Security intervening. Yet they could be on stage.)

In particular, they shared with Grunge the ability to make music that was both aggressive and languid, which swaggered and stumbled at same time, music you were never sure whether it was intent on fucking you up or fucking itself up. And if rock music’s about capturing the teenage experience, then that’s pretty much it.

Some seventeen years after their dissolution, it doesn’t look like they’ve cleaned up their act any. The set list seems to be decided upon on the spot. Jennifer Herrema is quite unashamedly out of it, slurringly rambling between songs. Some frontmen affect effortless cool, others come across as crazy outsiders and others just look like audience members arbitrarily placed onstage. Herrema seems have all three going on.

As the last time I saw them (pre-dissolution), Neil Hagerty seems both more together and more unassuming. Notably, as they come on it’s Herrema who gets the applause. (From their stage personas, you’d imagine them as having a Chuck D and Flava Flav relationship, striker and team mascot, though that doesn’t seem to be the way they actually worked.)

You’d probably drive yourself mad trying to figure out how much it’s meant to sound that way, and how much its just coming out like that. It is uneven. (And YouTube suggests other nights might have been still more uneven.) But that’s kind of the point. Rock music is supposed to be volatile and unpredictable, something you don’t do right by doing correctly. (Or it least it was before it became a heritage industry celebrated by Tory MPs.)

For a band who always manage to sound just like Royal Trux, there’s quite a variety to their music. Rip-roaring punk anthems co-exist with out-there noise guitar and, at one point, a trance-out groove with mantra vocals.

It’s generally considered that the weight of rock history got too much and snuffed out the creative spark. Bands became merely citational, concerned with keeping a tradition intact, like the worst kind of folk music. Keeping things vibrant meant wiping all that from your mind and just striking your guitar.

Yet perhaps the most interesting thing about this band, formally speaking, is that they quite openly took up rock history, often sounding unashamedly like ’Exile’ era Stones, and even releasing a trilogy of albums which represented the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties respectively. And it never seemed to dampen them down.

From Manchester, a couple of days before...

OOIOO

Patterns, Brighton, Mon 29th May

Yoshimi is the only perpetual member of Japanoise ensemble the Boredoms, already acknowledged as a Lucid Frenzy fave, save main man Yamatsuka Eye. For which, given their great musical switches and leaps, there is probably some endurance award. Perhaps it was being made the heroine of the classic Flaming Lips album ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’.

But pedigree though that is, you should put it all aside, really. As OOIOO are very much their own outfit. Though chiefly known with the Boredoms for playing drums, here she trades in guitar and, on occasion, the trumpet. Reviews suggest they were previously more a solo project with some hired help. But tonight they couldn’t be a more focused live band.

There’s the post-punk of the Slits and Raincoats; the off-kilter rhythms and scatter drums, the songs which seem to construct and deconstruct themselves. There’s also the deranged funk of the Talking Heads’ more out-there moments. But there’s also abundant girl-band harmonies and pumping pop hooks. Better hooks, in fact, than any pop band you’ve heard lately.

Like Deerhoof, there’s the sense that left-field sonic exploits and pure pop aren’t being brought together, but were only ever separate in your mind. As Thrill Jockey say, they’ve “subverted expectations and warped perceptions of what constitutes pop and experimental music”. But more, there’s the same exuberance, the feeling they’re making music for the sheer joyous pleasure of playing it.

But there’s less of the naivete of Deerhoof. In fact the melodic yet skittering instrumental breaks are more reminiscent of what prog did after post-punk had happened by and unplugged it’s mellotrons. Think if ‘Discipline’ era King Crimson had become a Deerhoof covers band. Or possibly vice versa.

And that weird name which sounds like binary notation, apparently based on some doodle of Eye’s, barely pronounceable to the rest of us, Yoshimi manages to say it like it means something.

OOIOO gigs are quite literally a delight.

THE COSMIC DEAD

The Green Door Store, Brighton, Thurs 25th May

Let's start by conceding the point. Yes, the Cosmic Dead is a crap name. Mashing up the name of a couple of classic psychedelic bands is akin to calling a soul group Sly and the Family Tops, or a punk band the Buzz Pistols. But don't judge this book by the cover, okay?

The… polite cough... are a self-styled “psychonautal cosmodelic buckfaustian quartet from Glasgow”. And after seeing Mugstar and entertaining the prospect of the map being bejewelled by numerous Hawkwind-styled bands, the Hertfordshire Hawkwind and the Huddlesfield Hawkwind and so on, it seems there really is a Glaswegian Hawkwind. Okay, alliteration would compel them into becoming the Glasgow Gong. But they sound more like Hawkwind, and when was that ever a bad thing? (Extensive research reveals they've even released a split record with Mugstar.)

Arriving late after being held up mid-Channel tunnel, and sound-checking hurriedly before us assembled folk, they launch straight into their out-there space rock. There's scant regard for song elements to let us in gently. It's all cosmic jams, and cosmic jams today, no stodgy sandwich parts to chew through. There's occasional vocals, but more spacey chants than singing. In fact when they speak, it's easier for them to eschew the mikes and avoid all their assembled effects and delays. (Fortunately their tonsils are at Glasgow decibels, so mikes prove superfluous.)

What does a band need if it's going to get really unhinged? A hinge, right? Tracks are rooted in a powerful rhythm section however far they wander, which keeps things compelling rather than meandering. Rather than float and morph, they tend to shift between quite well defined sections. The result is a set which feels absolutely out of control and entirely driven at one and the same time. Proceedings ends with the guitars looping and everyone bashing at drums. Bar the keyboardist, who adjusts the sound via dials, balanced precariously on an alarmingly teetering stack of amps.

I start to seriously consider that holding a band back from the stage till the last moment, perhaps by 'forgetting' their dressing room key, might actively encourage them to let rip when they finally get there. So we may partly have Channel Tunnel stoppages to thank for such a blistering set. If so Southern Rail could be a gift to the Brighton gig circuit.

Their other remarkable feature, besides being such a good band with so bad a name, is the keyboardist's uncanny similarity to a young Robert Wyatt. I'm not such what the market value of Robert Wyatt lookalikes is, but should there be one this guy could be away.

BRITTEN SINFONIA + BRIGHTON FESTIVAL CHORUS
Brighton Dome, Sun 28th May
Part of the Brighton Festival

This programme, bringing together works by Aaron Copeland and John Adams, was officially about the combining of words and music. Pieces were written around both poems and speeches. But my mind became more fixed on a phrase of Adams’ from the programme. On writing ’Harmonium’ (1980), he said “those of my friends who knew both [my] room and the piece were amused that music of such spaciousness should emerge from such cramped quarters.”

And that very American sense of spaciousness seemed to infuse the works. Someone hatched the ingenious idea to stage Copland’s ’Fanfare for the Common Man’ (1942) with two brass sections placed up at either ends of the circle, granting it a natural stereo effect. But it also gave a sense of physical space to a piece with great musical space, like one of those drawings where little is actually drawn, but large expanses are still somehow suggested.

It was followed by his ’Lincoln Portrait’ from the same year. Now we at Lucid Frenzy towers are less than entirely convinced by the whole ‘Lincoln freed the slaves’ narrative, as perpetuated here. (Brief summary of argument – don’t believe the hype.) Yet a Lincoln quote, if said in 1862, does seem to describe his music: “the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present… As our case is new, so we must think and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.” To this day Copland sounds bold, new and expressive, something like Berenice Abbott’s dynamic New York photography.

Copland may be a rare example of a genuinely successful Modernist. If we were to take Modernism at its word, it aimed to rid art of its cultural baggage and just speak directly. Yet most found it challenging, if not indecipherable. To find a value in it, we often have to reject seeing it in its own terms. Yet Copland’s music feels like it’s aimed straight at your heart. It was populist in the positive sense of the term, and even became popular. Both pieces being conceived of as contributions to the war effort suggest art with a social purpose.

’Harmonium’ was written when Adams was still breaking away from Modernism proper, and with it’s sinfonia and full choir must have seemed something wildly different. In fact the choir is dominant for long sections. The brass in particular seemed indebted to Copland, yet also making an appearance is Terry Riley’s ’In C’… in fact, its actual C! In my favourite section the double basses took up a low thrum, which slowly spread through the other instruments before finally sparking the full-throated choir off again. A crescendo, about the thing you least expect from a Minimalist composer.

Had Adams asked my opinion before composing this piece, I’d have probably told him he was attempting to pull together the irreconcilable and could only end up with the most jack-of-all-trades post-modern slop. Fortunately for us all he didn’t, and the piece works superbly.

As with the previous programme of American music, these dark and orange days seem the most important time to remind ourselves of what is positive in American culture. How much of it came from an immigrant/ New World perspective, of recombining and making new what had come before. And how much it then contributed back to the rest of the world.

This has been not just a great week’s run of gigs, but one where each event has it’s own unique character. You might not expect Copland to sound much like Melt-Banana, and he didn’t. But then neither were Melt-Banana much like Royal Trux, or either like the Cosmic Dead. Everything was best at being itself.